Category Archives: Finnegans Wake

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Another four minutes of animation:

The above clip covers a single paragraph from Finnegans Wake – the one starting near the bottom of p. 172 and ending near the top of p. 174 in most editions. Parts one and two are embedded inthe previous blogpost, which also discusses this project’s genesis and the collaboration with Mike Watt.

While I hope that viewers will find the animation here fun and entertaining, I especially hope they find it illuminating. This paragraph contains only two sentences, the second of which is nearly a page-and a-half long, and while its actual word-distortion is fairly tame by comparison with other parts of the book, readers can still get get dizzy just trying to parse out the syntax. Joyce does this quite a lot in Finnegans Wake – often burying the subject and verb deep in a sentence’s middle amid a polyglot of modifiers, prepositions, subordinate clauses, parentheticals etc. – so my priority with this sentence was to demonstrate its basic structure without compromising any of its spectacular phantasmagoria.

Another feature I hope will prove instructive is my inclusion of the various hieroglyphs Joyce created as thematic building blocks for the Wake:

One can think of these glyphs quite literally as “characters” – not only in their typographical sense: e.g. “280 characters per tweet max,” but in their dramatic sense as well: i.e. “players in a story.” For the record, Wake scholars generally refer to them as sigla, a plural Latin word basically meaning “characters.” Its singular form is siglum.

The “star” of part three, obviously, is the fifth siglum from the left, the one that looks like a square missing a side. This is the symbol Joyce used in his notebooks, letters, manuscripts etc to denote his autobiographical counterpart in the Wake and protagonist of chapter seven: Shem the Penman. This little character afforded me the opportunity to literally dramatize Shem’s exertions as he wards off vilification and scandal, and in doing so, I found myself deliberately borrowing images from the video games of my childhood – Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Asteroids, Missile Command, etc. Much like Finnegans Wake itself, these games were by their very nature studies in overwhelm, and their stories never ended happily. Part of me wanted to lift letters from the pile at the end to spell “game over” rather than “end of part three.”

But the chapter is far from over, and there is much left to depict as well as blog about. WordPress unfortunately doesn’t allow for special font uploading, so I can’t write about the sigla here as I’d like to. A real shame: They’re an extremely helpful tool for mapping one’s way through Finnegans Wake, so my plan is to eventually put up a series of youtube tutorials – similar to mythunderword pronunciation guides– discussing each of these glyphs/characters/sigla in detail.

It’s been a year-and-a-half since the last JoyceGeek blog, but not for want of JoyceGeek activity. Sometime back in 2015, Derek Pyle, the project director over at Waywords and Meansigns, introduced me to punk bassist Mike Watt of ‘Minutemen’ fame, and the three of us embarked on a journey which, after much hard but wonderful labor (and at the expense of what would otherwise probably have been more JoyceBlogging) is at long last ready to be shared with the general public.

It’s a verbo-musical rendering of the entire seventh episode of Finnegans Wake, commonly referred to as ‘Shem the Penman’, and it is now available for free download at Waywords and Meansigns. The piece in its entirety is 75 minutes long, which may be a lot to take on for some, so I’ve made a ‘teaser” of sorts – a short five-minute film depicting the first page-and-a-half. I hope to eventually animate the entire chapter and present it in full-length, but animation is really time-consuming work, so we’ll all need to be patient. In the meantime, enjoy what I’ve done so far:

If you like what you see and you have 75 minutes to spare, you might enjoy listening to the whole chapter:

So why a film? After nearly twenty years of performing Finnegan live, I’ve come to realize that people need all the help they can get. Not to overstate the obvious, but Finnegans Wakeis an extremely difficult book to read even when – as in the ‘Shem’ chapter – the language is comparatively simple. Much has been said about the importance of hearing the Wake read aloud, and while it’s true that a great deal is lost if a reader can’t at least create some kind of aural experience – with audiobooks or even imaginatively – for herself as she reads it, it’s equally true that the reader who relies solely on audio versions without a visual text to consult is likely to lose even more. Spoken word and printed word are the yin and yang of understanding Finnegans Wake – readers ultimately need both.

As the project grows, there is much to celebrate and there are many to thank:

Derek Pyle – I don’t know how he does it, but the man is a social network unto himself, and I’ll never be able to thank him enough for hooking me up with Mike Watt. Derek also gave some badly needed beta-testing input last year at a time when the audio mix was finally starting to take its proper shape.

Mike Watt – I still can’t believe I’m typing that name. This initially started as his project, and when Derek introduced us, my proposal to him was simply to offer my help with stuff like pronunciation and the like. Watt’s no-caps reply was “wanna do the spiel?” – and off we went. So I have that to thank him for, but so much more than that – the music he wrote, that simple, minimalist bass-line – a total of twenty bars looped into a river of sound – I’ve been working with it for over a year now, and I never tire of listening to it.

Jono Manson – His vast pro-tools knowledge and truly good nature made working on what was supposed to be the “tedious” stuff a real and absolute joy.

Addendum – 02/24/2018

It’s funny I should wait to post part two on my website nearly a full year since I first put it up on YouTube. It just goes to show you how all-consuming this animation stuff is. Part three is still under construction and won’t be ready for another month or two. In the meantime, enjoy:

Addendum – 04/21/2018

Okay, I made the two month deadline I gave myself – just barely. Part three is up and available on youtube and I’ve written about it with a link to the clip here.

Simon Loekle – self-caricatured at left with his cat, Clancy – leaves in his wake a truly impressive body of original work. You can read about some of his other achievements here, but the topic of this JoyceGeek blogpost is his Finnegans Wake audio project – a painstakingly methodical reading of the book which, at the pace he was working at, would have taken an additional 50 years to complete. While nobody expected him to actually finish this thing, we were all expecting he’d at least get through book three. But Simon suddenly passed away a couple of days ago (11/28/2015) at the age of (almost) 63.

Starting in 1996, Simon would spend as much as two months preparing for his “As I Please: The Year-Out Wake Show” – which took place on the final Saturday of every year – the final hour-or-so of which would be dedicated to a few pages from Finnegans Wake. Had fate’s fickle finger not forced such an early departure, we might have actually seen an earlier completion than 2065, for Simon was in fact starting to pick up the pace. He included a special “Shem the Penman” reading a few months before his usual Year-Out Wake Show, and the last time we talked, he indicated that he would be making it a habit to dedicate more than one hour a year to the Wake.

But this is it: everything he is known to have recorded of Finnegans Wake covers just under six of seventeen chapters. For the sake of accessibility, I’ve broken his recordings down into smaller audio files based on paragraph breaks. The original files were downloaded from either FWEET, WBAI, or in one case Simon himself, who very graciously sent me his earliest recording – book one chapter eight: “Anna Livia Plurabelle” when I complained about the audio quality of the file he sent to Raphael Slepon for FWEET.

A couple of notes about the recording itself: Incomplete though it may be, I still count it as unabridged – each chapter is done in its entirety with the exception of “Jaun” (pp. 429-473, truncated by that aforementioned fickle finger) and “Shem” (pp. 169-195, which he was pressed for time to squeeze into a single show, and so skipped the ‘song’ on page 175 and the Latin passage on page 185). I’m not here to review Simon’s work, but I do have to say that his reading of book two chapter three (FW309-382) – an absolute behemoth of a chapter which took him seven years to record – is a particularly impressive achievement. Most audiobook recordings of the Wake avoid this chapter altogether, but Simon attacks it with gusto, even including incidental music during parts of the Butt/Taff exchange (FW338-355). The ending of that particular section is an absolute treat – my personal favorite in fact. If you only have time to listen to one file, go straight to “FW354.07-36 (2004)”.

A final note: I suspect Simon was aware that December 27, 2014 would be his last Year-Out Wake Show, for he does something at the end of that broadcast he had never done before. For the better part of twenty years, Simon would always find a convenient and comfortable stopping place at the end of a paragraph and pick up the next year’s reading with the following paragraph. For his 2014 recording, however, not only does he stop reading before reaching the end of the paragraph, he stops mid-sentence. Typical Joycean.

So enjoy the audio files, and remember to thank Mr. Loekle as you do so. His was the very portrait of generosity, and we’re all very lucky to have had him.

There are lots of ways to read Joyce, and really, none of them are conventional.

After all, Joyce’s writing remains outside even today’s boundaries of convention – a full century later. So for the nonce (but not really), I’d like to recommend the following programme: Start by reading Finnegans Wake, and when that’s done, read Ulysses, then A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and finally Dubliners. Do this as if these books were written in this order, as if they were intended to be read in this order, as if this were their natural order of ascending complexity, and no fool in their right mind would dare even crack open Dubliners without first having fully immersed themselves in the later works – particularly Finnegans Wake.

It’s a little something I like to call Reverse-Reading, a practice that brings insights into the earlier works that quite simply would not be possible otherwise. I wouldn’t be surprised actually if the term has been used before, for the practice itself certainly has. Some of my favorite Dubliners studies are in fact by Finnegans Wake scholars: John Gordon and Margot Norris come immediately to mind (links are to the books I recommend). John’s wonderfully dense reading of A Little Cloud pairs itself beautifully with the “Issy” character outline in Finnegans Wake, and Margot has a brilliant Reverse-Reading of Two Gallants that places the events it describes after those of Ulysses – as if it were a sequel. Plus, a great many Wake scholars – John and Margot included – have observed that the washerwomen of Finnegans Wake who “tuck up” their sleeves as they prepare for their day’s work at the beginning of chapter 8 (FW196.8) are later seen “pulling down” those same sleeves as they come in from their day’s work at the beginning of Clay.

I discovered a pretty amazing Reverse-Reading of my own a while back – it’s of a single short story, the second in the Dubliners collection – An Encounter. The story itself is a short and simple read – one of the quickest in the book – and while it is celebrated for its visceral depiction of youthful awakenings, it’s often misunderstood as one of the “lesser” Dubliners installments, generally when compared to Araby, A Little Cloud, The Dead, etc. A straightforward Reverse-Reading of An Encounter from a Wakean should hopefully – well – reverse this misconception.

So why is this story so often marginalized? Most complaints center around the seeming lack of structure. An Encounter is a bit of a structural salmagundi for non-Wake readers; as John Wyse Jackson and Bernard McGinley so well observe (p. 20):

…this is not one story, but two half-stories. A narrative that starts out about the Dillon brothers loses one of them, then the other: the business of miching from school is then bolted on to the account of the strange meeting. Most exasperating of all, [the story has] no conclusive ending. The inconclusive petering out shows how much Joyce needed catching up with by the contemporary reader. He still does.

“Contemporary readers” might very well be stumped, but none of these “inconclusive peterings-out” should hold the least amount of concern for the Finnegans Wake reader. Conclusive endings? Who needs endings at all? Half-stories bolted together? Pshaw – try half-words bolted together. And so what if Joe Dillon is completely vanished from the narrative before the first page is half-over? Do Wake readers care that “Sir Tristram, violer d’amores,” the first character to be introduced in Finnegans Wake (3.04), makes no further appearance? Hardly.

For one thing, “Sir Tristram” doesn’t really vanish at all – his ‘love-violations’ continue deep into the book and even build in scope – it’s only his name that changes. Granted, his name changes a lot – at every available opportunity in fact – as many as five times within the book’s first full paragraph alone: “topsawyer’s rocks”, “tauftauf thuartpeatrick”, “a bland old isaac”, “twone nathandjoe”, “Rot a peck of pa”, etc. In Joyce’s world, characters are identified by their actions; names are as interchangeable as playing cards.

This program of identification is not arbitrary randomization – it has movement toward a purpose, and is key to understanding Joyce’s revolutionary method of character development, which he actually gives a name to in Ulysses:

METEMPSYCHOSIS

That’s right – Metempsychosis – the only ten-dollar word in Ulysses that you don’t have to look up in the dictionary, for Leopold Bloom himself gives it a full and extended definition in the ‘Calypso’ chapter: reincarnation, “the transmigration of souls”, the phenomenon whereby an individual’s psychological value is transferred from one persona to another. This is how Cranley from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man can transmigrate to Buck Mulligan in Ulysses and then on to Shaun the Post in Finnegans Wake, for example. My favorite description of how the transmigration works comes from Ananda K. Coomaraswamy* who, like Bloom, ties the concept of transmigrating to that of karma:

[Imagine] a series of billiard balls in close contact: if another ball is rolled against the last stationary ball, the moving ball will stop dead, and the foremost stationary ball will move on. Here precisely is Buddhist transmigration: the first moving ball does not pass over, it remains behind, it dies; but it is precisely the movement of that ball, its momentum, its karma, and not any newly created movement, which is reborn in the foremost ball. […] Nothing is transmitted but an impulse, a vis a tergo, dependent on the heaping up of the past. It is a man’s character, and not himself, that goes on.

*Buddha and the Gospel of Buddhism, pp. 107-108. The original “new age” movement, spearheaded by Coomaraswamy, Helena Blavatsky, W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory et al was very much en vogue in Dublin during the period of An Encounter‘s composition, and while Joyce couldn’t ultimately stomach all of the mystical mumbo-jumbo, he did spend some time studying it; he was even seen walking about Dublin carrying a copy of H. S. Olcott’s Buddhist Catechism as if he were a clergyman carrying a prayerbook.

Returning to An Encounter, Joe Dillon does indeed appear to completely vanish from the story with a simple two-sentence paragraph:

—Everyone was incredulous when it was reported that he had a vocation for the priesthood. Nevertheless it was true.

Appearances can deceive, however. True, Joe Dillon – much like the billiard ball in Coomaraswamy’s metaphor – has been ‘stopped dead’; it’s as if entering the seminary is tantamount to a death sentence in fact, for no further mention is given to Joe or his “war dance of victory”. But even here in this brief half-page of text, Joe Dillon’s actions have already ‘heaped up’ enough momentum so that the karmic impulses he started – a morbid blend of aggression and piety – are easily transmitted to the character of Father Butler on the following page, who, though he no longer wears a tea cozy on his head shouting “Ya! yaka, yaka, yaka!”, is indeed found humiliating his students as he teaches them Julius Caesar’s Commentaries onthe Gallic Wars as if he expected them to memorize it:

—This page or this page? This page? Now, Dillon, up. Hardly had the day… Go on! What day? Hardly had the day dawned… Have you studied it? What have you there in your pocket?

No simple change of plotline can eliminate the influence of this future priest; it remains ubiquitous throughout the story: Mahoney bullies the smaller children in the street in likely response to being bullied himself by the even bigger Joe Dillon. The narrator’s haughty attitude towards “National School boys” is lifted directly from Father Butler’s ‘rebuke’, and Leo Dillon’s cowardly choice to forgo the miching adventure is influenced most likely by both brother and priest. Mahoney’s question, “what would Father Butler be doing out at the Pigeon House” is not nearly so rhetorical when viewed in this light.

Like Joe before him, younger brother Leo Dillon is also expelled from the narrative after brief prominence as its central figure. This second disappearance raises the question as to whether Leo’s character transmigrates as well, and again, if we look to the behavior patterns, especially the specific role Leo plays up to the point the other boys abandon him, I believe that an answer reveals itself. One has almost to look twice at the phrase: “…the confused, puffy face of Leo Dillon awakened one of my consciences” to notice that the word employed here is ‘consciences’ rather than ‘consciousness’. On the surface at least, consciousness would be a much tighter semantic fit given its pairing with ‘awakened’. But the story’s central issue has less to do with awareness per se than than it does with moral rectitude. After all, An Encounter‘s final sentence shows us a ‘penitent’ (i.e. ‘conscientious’) narrator – the direct result of having seen another ‘confused’ face, this time with “bottle-green eyes peering…from under a twitching forehead.”

Evidence that this nameless and deeply troubled stranger in the field at Ringsend is the abandoned and transmigrated soul of Leo Dillon, though perhaps less direct than Joe’s vocational connection, nevertheless abounds. Soon after his appearance, the stranger’s behavior is observed as unusual: “I wondered why he shivered once or twice as if he feared something…” As his attitude is “strangely liberal,” maybe this phantom fear is of humiliation or castigation from the likes of Father Butler or Mr. Ryan. That “his accent was good” indicates higher, perhaps Jesuitical education, but the strongest argument for the stranger’s metempsychotic link to Leo Dillon is his warped sexuality and sadism, which could easily be an advanced stage of what originated in childhood as overeating, idleness, and inability to adapt to an environment of constant bullying, derision, and oppression.

So next question: is there a third? This is after all a story about childhood, and children’s stories invariably require a third occurrence in order to reach completion. In fact, the story itself seems to be keenly aware of what has come to be commonly known as the “Rule of Three“:

When we came to the Smoothing Iron we arranged a siege; but it was a failure because you must have at least three.

The story’s third banishment is of course Mahoney, who, when he runs off to chase the cat, disappears from the narrative much like the Dillon brothers before him. For a full two pages – taking us nearly all the way to the end of the story – the young narrator’s interaction with the pedophilic stranger so completely dominates the narrative that Mahoney himself seems to forget he’s still part of it:

—Murphy!—My voice had an accent of forced bravery in it, and I was ashamed of my paltry stratagem. I had to call the name again before Mahony saw me and hallooed in answer.

Note that for a moment at least, Mahoney here becomes ‘Murphy’, a very brief identity-shift which, while it falls just short of outright Dillon-style metempsychosis, nevertheless touches on the story’s pattern of exile and transformed return. This is not just a clever storytelling trick – it actually points us toward the nature of the narrator’s final penitence, the real karmic momentum of An Encounter which has been accrued not by Mahoney nor even the Dillon brothers, but by the narrator himself. It is the narrator’s personal agenda – his longings for a sense of personal agency, for adventure abroad, for distinction from the common rabble – that drive the plot forward. Notice, too, that in the three stories which he narrates, we never learn his real name – the only name we’re ever given is a pseudonym – ‘Smith’:

—In case he asks us for our names, I said, let you be Murphy and I’ll be Smith.

The good Reverse-Reader should here recall the finale of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where Stephen Dedalus, obviously one-and-the-same as the narrator of the first three Dubliners stories, likens himself to a blacksmith in the novel’s penultimate sentence, and note once again how Joyce slyly invokes moral rectitude by swapping the word ‘consciousness’ with its phonetic double, ‘conscience’:

I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

Awe-inspiring though Stephen’s declaration here may be, it is also dangerously arrogant – bordering on self-apotheosis – and contains within it a seed of his Icarus-like fall in Ulysses. Who is this young upstart to claim he can create his race’s conscience? Even given such a power, what’s to prevent him from abusing it? It is the narrator himself who ejects the Dillon Brothers and Mahoney from his story, and his motivation for doing so should be obvious: this is his adventure, and he’ll do whatever it takes to eliminate any and all rival protagonists. Ethically, his actions are highly questionable; he in fact commits all three types of “sin” as defined by the Catholic church:

Sin by thought:
Elitism and bigotry; “I was afraid the man would think I was as stupid as Mahony.”

Sin by word:
Malice and gloating: “We revenged ourselves on Leo Dillon by saying what a funk he was and guessing how many he would get at three o’clock from Mr. Ryan.”

Sin by deed:
Deception and theft: He pockets Leo Dillon’s sixpence.
(An interesting side note: The law of karma – being the equivalent of ‘sin’ in Buddhist theology – requires that this stolen sixpence eventually be surrendered, and it can be no coincidence that the narrator winds up paying an unnecessary sixpence at the bazaar’s turnstile in Araby:

I could not find any sixpenny entrance and, fearing that the bazaar would be closed, I passed in quickly through a turnstile, handing a shilling to a weary-looking man.

Thus do the various stories in the Dubliners collection start to inter-connect.)

So An Encounter‘s principle meditation – be it Buddhist, Christian, secular or what have you – is undeniably moral: All actions reap consequence. The final sentences show us a narrator who has truly reaped as he has sown, whose actions in thought, word, and deed have succeeded in forging his friends into monsters – one of which is about to grab him by the ankles. His only hope of escape from the smithy-of-his-soul’s own creation, then, is to return to Mahoney and relinquish to his friend that which he had up to this point so zealously coveted for himself – the title of True Hero:

How my heart beat as he came running across the field to me! He ran as if to bring me aid. And I was penitent; for in my heart I had always despised him a little.

That the nearly forgotten Mahoney with his paltry catapult and boorish ways should wind up charging to the rescue here is perhaps the most touchingly ironic detail of the entire Dubliners collection. No conclusive ending? I say it again – pshaw. The stunning irony here is that Joe Dillon and his ferocious tactics never really vanished at all; the narrator may have tried to write them out of his story, but by the end, he finds himself very much needing them, and much like Little Chandler and Gabriel Conroy, must then endure a profound humbling. An Encounter‘s ending is every bit as powerful as those of A Little Cloud or The Dead – perhaps even more so.

I don’t have much interest in defending my metempsychosis reading in terms of being definitively what Joyce intended when composing An Encounter. After all, the narrative elisions in this story can be filled in any number of ways, and if this reading somehow interferes with other alternate readings, then into the dustbin it goes, no further questions asked. I can only reiterate that this is a Reverse-Reading, that these kinds of imaginative insights can only be fostered by Reverse-Reading, and even setting the question of Joyce’s intentionality aside, this particular story now has an uncannily strong narrative cohesion, very much thanks to Reverse-Reading.

And the Reverse-Reading insights continue. Any Finnegans Wake reader should recognize an early Shem/Shaun study in the diametrically opposed temperaments of the Dillon brothers, and there is a specific Shem/Shaun sub-category that conforms to the Dillon brothers near-perfectly: the Jiminies from the ‘Prankquean’ passage (FW pp. 21-23) which I blogged about a few posts ago. In the ‘Prankquean’, we have a pair of brothers (“Jiminy” = Gemini: twin brothers), one of which is comic (“Hillary” = hilarity), the other tragic (“Tristopher” = Italian/Spanish/Portuguese: triste, sad), along with a third companion, a “dummy”. Each in their turn are “kidsnapped up” (= vanished) by the Prankquean and returned with a difference: Hillary (= Joe) is “convorted” (= converted/distorted) into a “tristian” (= sad christian = Fr. Butler), and Tristopher (= Leo) becomes “provorted” (= perverted/distorted) into a “luderman” (= German: luder man = scoundrel-man / Irish: ludramán, lazy idler = Ringsend pedophile). A third “kidsnapping” is presumably about to be visited upon the “dummy” (= Mahoney, described as “stupid” by the narrator), but is aborted by a thunderclap (= An Encounter‘s shocking finale).

As I demonstrated in “The Prankquean Matrix,” Joyce puts the “rule of three” storytelling trope to very specific use in his works, always casting a female in the role of instigator against a stubborn male protagonist. On the surface, An Encounter appears bereft of any female characters whatsoever, but females are by no means completely absent – the story contains a total of three (!) very striking yet etheric evocations of feminine power:

“…the peaceful odour of Mrs Dillon was prevalent in the hall of the house.”

“I liked better some American detective stories which were traversed from time to time by unkempt fierce and beautiful girls.”

“I watched him lazily as I chewed one of those green stems on which girls tell fortunes.”

Given these oddly supernatural descriptions, I would argue the feminine link to be metempsychotic. The word “metempsychosis” is itself introduced in Ulysses on an absolute tidal wave of feminine imagery in the ‘Calypso’ chapter – a chapter rife with meditations on feminine processes and symbols of feminine power. When asked by Molly to define the word, Bloom turns to a picture of a bathing nymph he has hanging over the bed, and gives a very odd but tellingly associative definition:

—Metempsychosis […] is what the ancient Greeks called it. They used to believe you could be changed into an animal or a tree, for instance. What they called nymphs, for example. (U 4.375)

Typically, Bloom here confuses his concepts – his nymph analogy is much more like metamorphosis than transmigration, but the nymph’s presence here serves Joyce’s overall purpose by permanently associating metempsychosis with the feminine. This imagery in fact builds throughout the novel, so that when we reach Bloom’s hallucination in ‘Oxen of the Sun’ we have a near-literal apotheosis:

And lo, wonder of metempsychosis, it is she, the everlasting bride, harbinger of the daystar, the bride, ever virgin. It is she, Martha, thou lost one, Millicent, the young, the dear, the radiant. How serene does she now arise, a queen among the Pleiades, in the penultimate antelucan hour, shod in sandals of bright gold, coifed with a veil of what do you call it gossamer. It floats, it flows about her starborn flesh and loose it streams, emerald, sapphire, mauve and heliotrope, sustained on currents of the cold interstellar wind, winding, coiling, simply swirling, writhing in the skies a mysterious writing till, after a myriad metamorphoses of symbol, it blazes, Alpha, a ruby and triangled sign upon the forehead of Taurus. (U 14.1099)

Notice how Bloom’s associative cluster links the feminine not just to metempsychosis, but to the very concept of mutable identity, whether it be through transmigration, “myriad metamorphoses of symbol,” or what have you. This is nothing less than a portrait of the Goddess Metempsychosis, the Goddess Metamorphosis, Molly, Milly, Martha, Seaside Girl, Pleiadean queen, etc. By naming her differently at nearly each occurrence – thus making her as formless and mutable as water itself – Joyce gives us the freedom to assign to her whichever epithet we want. ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ is the general first choice for most Finnegans Wake readers, particularly when Joyce comes up with a sentence likes this:

—In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven! (FW 104.1-3)

For present purposes I’ll simply call her The Prankquean. Unkempt, fierce, and stunningly beautiful, her matrix is given its very first full expression in Joyce’s canon with An Encounter, which I’ll summarize using the formula I developed in “The Prankquean Matrix“:

Once upon a time, a thing happensA young boy (the narrator) seeks adventure. In his words,”I wanted real adventures to happen to myself.”

As a result, three things happen, one after the otherExercising his right as author of his own story, he banishes three schoolmates who threaten to usurp his position as chief protagonist.

The first thing goes POWHe banishes Joe Dillon, who returns as Father Butler via metempsychosis.

The second thing also goes POWHe banishes Leo Dillon, who returns as the “queer old josser” – again via metempsychosis.

But the third thing goes BOOMHe banishes Mahoney, who returns to the rescue as “Murphy” – via metamorphosis.

And now it’s a new thingPenitence.

I’ll let Joyce himself have the final word here. As you either watch the following video or read Finnegans Wake pp. 21-23 (on which it is based), consider how the events of An Encounter are echoed in its narrative:

BLOGGER’S WARNING

Attention: the following blog-post contains sketchy, inaccurate, and in some places downright faulty interpretations of passages in Finnegans Wake. DO NOT COPY AND PASTE THESE READINGS INTO YOUR OWN TERM PAPER. Never mind the plagiarism issue; no self-respecting college professor would ever give these readings a second thought; they’ll simply circle the year of the Wake‘s publication (1939) or perhaps the year of Joyce’s death (1941) and give you an ‘F’.

But these readings are a good deal of fun, and they happen all the time in Wake reading groups, so here we go:

#1) “Batman’s Biff” (FW336.34-337.3)

The Passage:

—All to which not a lot snapped The Nolan of the Calabashes at his whilom eweheart photognomist who by this sum taken was as much incensed by Saint Bruno as that what he had consummed was his own panegoric, and wot a lout about it if it was only a pippappoffpigeon shoot that gracesold getrunner, the man of centuries, was bowled out by judge, jury and umpire at batman’s biff like a witchbefooled legate. Dupe.

Its Context:

This paragraph is transitional, taking place as it does between two major sections of the chapter in which it occurs. The preceding section, known as “Kersse and the Norwegian Captain” (pp. 311-332) describes what Adaline Glasheen calls a “comedy of love-intrigue,” and is full of goofy cadences and sing-songy repartee. The passage that follows it – known as “Buckley and the Russian General” (pp. 337-355), concerns warfare and assassination and so is much darker in tone.

The lunatic reads it like this:

“The Nolan” here is Christopher Nolan, celebrated Hollywood filmmaker (“photognomist“) who with his “Batman” movie trilogy once and for all “bowled out” the cheesy campiness of the 1960s style Batman of Bob Kane and Adam West fame – with its tailored spandex costumes and its “pow,” “bash,” “biff“, and “pippappoff” sound-effect word-bubbles — in favor of what is often called “comic-noir”, a style brought to the fore in the 1980s by Frank Miller, Alan Moore and others, presenting a much grittier, darker, and more violent Gotham City. These two opposing styles are epitomized by the female arch-villains “Pigeon-Woman” (left: campy) and “Bruno” (right: noir):

Bruno (from Batman: the Dark Knight Triumphant by Frank Miller)

Pidgeon Woman (from All-Star Comics #67 – author unknown)

Also, the presence of female antagonists in this paragraph points to a major theme that runs throughout Finnegans Wake, in which the male-dominant mindset perceives itself as under constant threat of being undercut – or “witchbefooled” – by the feminine element.

Why Joyce didn’t use better-known Batman villainesses like Catwoman and Poison Ivy here is something of a mystery.

#2) “Tigerwood Roadstaff” (FW35.1-11)

Tiger Woods – wearing the latest in Nike rain-gear

The Passage:

They tell the story (an amalgam as absorbing as calzium chloereydes and hydrophobe sponges could make it) how one happygogustyIdes-of-April morning (the anniversary, as it fell out, of his first assumption of his mirthday suit and rights in appurtenance to the confusioning of human races) ages and ages after the alleged misdemeanour when the tried friend of all crea­tion, tigerwood roadstaff to his stay, was billowing across the wide expanse of our greatest park in his caoutchouc kepi and great belt and hideinsacks and his blaufunx fustian and ironsides jackboots and Bhagafat gaiters and his rubberised inverness, he met a cad with a pipe.

Its Context:

This sentence occurs in a chapter which – taken as a whole – describes the arc of the patriarch’s rise to power as well as his fall from grace. Written in the idiom of hearsay (“They tell the story…” is typical for this section of the book), the cause of the patriarch’s fall is attributed in some places to political corruption, in others to sexual scandal, and still others to the ascendancy of a younger, more vibrant generation. As to this last, several figures supplant one another in rapid succession in this chapter, creating something of an amalgam that Wake readers have come to know as H.C.E., Earwicker, Persse O’Reilly, etc.

The lunatic reads it like this:

The most beautiful golf-course on the planet (“our greatest park“) can arguably be found in the wealthy U.S. Georgian town of Augusta (“happygogusty“) and, being the host of the annual Masters tournament (held around mid-April – or “Ides-of-April” – every year), it is also the most prestigious.

Plus (Condoleeza’ Rice’s recent membership-approval notwithstanding), the Augusta National Golf Club is also notoriously racist, so much so that club member Frank “Fuzzy” Zoeller, who himself donned the green jacket (his “mirthday suit“) on 15 April 1979, allowed himself to freely make fried-chicken-and-collard-green remarks about the recent assumption of one Tiger Woods (“tigerwood“), an African-American/Korean hybrid who soundly trounced the competition with the tournament’s lowest ever golf score: -18, in 1997 and would go on to become the world’s first billionaire athlete.

Only white men had ever worn a green jacket before then, so this “confusioning of human races” proved a sizeable fly in Zoeller’s elitist ointment. Perhaps the only black person he had seen on a golf course prior to Tiger Woods was his caddy (“cad“), and perhaps his truly idiotic remarks were informed by a subconscious fear of being mugged “with a pipe“. As it turned out, however, Zoeller had much less to fear from Tiger Woods than he did the news cameras that recorded him, for his status as a public figure was irreparably decimated as a result of their capturing for all posterity his little racist gaffe. If only he had read Finnegans Wake beforehand, he might have seen that “calzium chloereydes” anagramizes into “H.C.E. Zoeller, U is my cad”, and so would have kept his mouth shut.

It is now the year 2015, and the soil of history has been turned over once again. Tiger Woods is no longer the regnant sports idol he once was, for a 2009 sex scandal put an end to his squeaky-clean image, his massive advertisement contracts, and even his heretofore impeccable golf-game. The next sports super-hero to come along will no doubt think himself immortal as well, but history knows better, as does the Wake.

Left: Fuzzy 1979 / Right: Tiger 2002 / Center: Earwicker forever

#3) “The Abnihilisation of the Etym” (FW353.22-32)

The nightmare of history never looked so pretty.

The Passage:

—[The abnihilisation of the etym by the grisning of the grosning of the grinder of the grunder of the first lord of hurtreford expolodotonates through Parsuralia with an ivanmorinthorrorumble fragoromboassity amidwhiches general uttermosts confussion are perceivable moletons skaping with mulicules while coventryplumpkins fairlygosmotherthemselves in the Landaunelegants of Pinkadindy. Similar scenatas are projectilised from Hullulullu, Bawlawayo, empyreal Raum and mordern Atems. They were precisely the twelves of clocks, noon minutes, none seconds. At someseat of Oldanelang’s Konguerrig, by dawnybreak in Aira.]

Its Context:

This bracketed paragraph is part of the aforementioned “Buckley and the Russian General” section – all about war, bloodshed and general bellicose behavior – and marks the climax of the story in which a lowly enlisted private stumbles upon an enemy commander in the act of relieving himself and, after some hesitation, eventually takes aim with his rifle and pulls the trigger. To mark the occasion, the above paragraph is placed immediately following the moment of assassination.

The lunatic reads it like this:

Many major cataclysmic events of World War II are peppered into this paragraph, including the bombings of Coventry (“coventry plumpkins“), Piccadilly Circus (“Landaunelegants of Pinkadindy“), and Honolulu (“Hullulullu“). Most notable of them all is of course the splitting (“abnihilisation“) of the atom (“etym” as well as “Atems“, with “mulicules” thrown in for good measure), giving birth to the atomic bomb – mankind’s most terrifying invention – which, when it “expolodotonates“, is capable of creating a second sun in the sky (“dawnybreak in Aira“), and putting all of us on doomsday watch, anxiously awaiting that dreaded moment when the clock’s hands reach “the twelves of clocks, noon minutes, none seconds“.

#4) A Puling Sample Jungle of Woods (FW112.3-8)

The Passage:

—You is feeling like you was lost in the bush, boy? You says: It is a puling sample jungle of woods. You most shouts out: Bethicket me for a stump of a beech if I have the poultriest no­tions what the farest he all means. Gee up, girly! The quad gos­pellers may own the targum but any of the Zingari shoolerim may pick a peck of kindlings yet from the sack of auld hensyne.

Its Context:

The chapter in which this paragraph appears takes for its subject a lost letter which, once found and deciphered, is rumoured to uncover the truth about the nature of Earwicker’s fall from grace. The letter’s contents are hardly discussed – only the paper, the handwriting, the type of ink used, the envelope in which the letter was sent, the diacritics, etc are described at any length. A few elements of the letter’s contents are given on the page immediately preceding the above paragraph, but they prove sketchy, trite, and unenlightening.

The lunatic reads it like this:

Joyce is directly addressing his readers here, empathizing with our frustration; he hears us complaining that Finnegans Wake is nothing more than a jumble of words, pure and simple (“a puling sample jungle of woods“). He counsels us, however, that while academics may be the official watchdogs of Wake exegesis (“The quad gos­pellers may own the targum“) we pedestrian lay-readers (“any of the Zingari shoolerim“) can take inspiration (“pick a peck of kindlings yet“) from whatever interpretation we please.

So sure: Christopher Nolan, Tiger Woods, J. Robert Oppenheimer – throw them all into the mix. They’re in there, whether Joyce knew of their existence or not.

Lunatics have their place in the world.

In truth, if you leave out that final conclusion, academic Wakeans interpret the paragraph on p. 112 pretty much the same as the lunatics, and they’ll even concede that the reading of example #3 is pretty darn hard to avoid. And actually, every Joycean I’ve presented #2 with has admitted that the Tiger Woods analogy is just plain uncanny. The only reading they would dismiss out-of-hand as utterly ridiculous is the whole thing about Batman. But even my fringe-reading of passage #1 (which I came up with on the fly in preparation for this blogpost, googling each word it contains for whatever Batman connection I could muster) can be contextualized within the major themes of the book, and to at least a certain degree, within the narrative journey of book II chapter 3 where it occurs.

So for a moment I’d like to step up and give the lunatic his due – albeit for just a moment. The concept of a “lunatic fringe” in Finnegans Wake studies is not my coinage – it actually comes from Roland McHugh who, in his extremely useful and informative book The Finnegans Wake Experience, uses the term to describe a kind of “anything goes” culture – quite prevalent in the 1960s – that would have utterly thwarted the exegetical project that he and so many other scholars were working to create back then. His Annotations books would never have come to light without a very strict set of guidelines by which glosses for a particular Wake word or phrase could be included in the formal list. And happily, Raphael Slepon has followed McHugh’s lead. While he always welcomes suggestions for additional FWEET elucidations (he only last week approved JGSF member Grant Franks’ suggestion of “nabla” for “nibbleh” at FW300.18), Raphael’s filters are notoriously – and rightly – tight. He has incorporated only four out of the seven suggestions I’ve sent to him over the years, despite the fact that I argued well for every single one.

But my point in presenting these lunatic Wake readings is to remind readers that formal exegesis will only get you so far if what you’re trying to do is actually understand what James Joyce was working to accomplish. When, in early 1940 – approximately one year after the Wake‘s publication – Finland was showing signs of successfully repelling a Russian invasion, Joyce fired off as many as five missives directing his friends’ attention to…

Quite the crusader, Joyce. But does this mean that Finnegans Wake is actually a book about the Russo-Finnish wars, that Helsinki, not Dublin, is the locus of the book’s activity, or that Joyce saw himself as some kind of clairvoyant? Let me be clear on this:

Absolutely not.

Joyce was keenly aware of what his new, elastic language was capable of accommodating, and by keeping himself well-informed on the topics of the day (including quantum physics, which he had a good armchair understanding of), he ensured that at least some of his deliberate predictions would come true, i.e. the atomic bomb, the leveling of Honolulu, Coventry, Piccadilly, etc. All pretty amazing, really, but prophecy is a ridiculously iffy game; Joyce missed the mark far oftener than he hit it. Rome, Athens and Bulawayo are also included in the ‘prophecy’ on p. 353, and all three cities made it through WW2 un-bombed. And oops: It would seem that Hiroshima wasn’t on Joyce’s radar at all. That this blog should be published on the 70th anniversary of that awful day is mere serendipity.

But serendipity, ephemeral though it is, is still part of the natural world, and the natural world, chaotic though it may be, is actually somewhat predictable. A hundred years from now, even Tiger Woods will have faded completely from cultural memory – only golf history nerds will know anything about him. The passage on p. 35 will continue to describe Earwicker’s struggles which are in no way exclusive to Woods, Zoeller, nor anyone else. Perhaps the passage’s language will uncannily accommodate some new headline involving a scandalized public figure – seems pretty likely in point of fact.

So no – the only supernatural thing about Finnegans Wake is its language, for language is itself a wildly bizarre phenomenon. The problem arises when real lunatics get hold of the book. I knew a guy once who believed that he himself was the hero of Finnegans Wake, that Joyce was writing about him and no-one else, and that all interpretations that differed from his own were wrong. And yet even here – in this blazing pit of solipsistic insanity – the Wake‘s yoke proves to be massively commodious; H.C.E.’s fall is, after all, as precipitous as the heights his megalomania allows him to climb. I think every Wake reader has at some point whimsically looked for their own name in the book’s pages – I know I have – and I’d be surprised if anyone has completely failed. If we don’t see a reflection of ourselves when we read the Wake – or really any book for that matter – we’re not looking hard enough.

Once upon an amalgam…

…a wise old wolf gave each of his three pigs a bag of talents. Two of the wicked stepsisters – their names were Goneril and Regan – were lazy and stupid and built their houses out of straw and sticks. So no matter how much the Big Bad Lear huffed and puffed, he couldn’t get the glass slipper to fit on a single foot, for the first bag of talents was way too hot and the second was far too soft.

But Cordelia’s bag of talents was just right, for she had built hers out of bricks.

So when Papa Lear found Cinderella sleeping in his bed, he cried, “Nothing will come from nothing,” and added, “Thou wicked and slothful servant, cast ye into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

And he married her and they all lived happily ever after. The End.

This is what happens after you’ve read enoughFinnegans Wake; stories become confounded and start blending together, especially if they exhibit even slight similarities. Matthew 25:14-30 melds into act I scene 1 from King Lear, who then becomes the Big Bad Wolf, who then somehow fits a glass slipper onto Cinderella, who in her turn becomes Goldilocks and so on. Distinctions such as ‘happy ending vs unhappy ending’, ‘wolf-and-pigs vs father-and-daughters’, ‘bags-of-talents vs bowls-of-porridge’, et cetera start to matter much less than the structural scaffolding these stories are all built on, for the pattern is unmistakably predictable:

Once upon a time, a thing happened.

As a result, three things happened, one after the other.

The first thing was a thing, and it went POW.

The second thing was a different thing from the first thing, but not really, for it also went POW, or maybe KA-POW.

But the third thing was a totally different thing, and it went BOOM, or maybe WHOOSH or THUD.

And we all learned a new thing. The end.

Apply this outline to any of the stories referenced in my little amalgam and they all fit, without exception. A whole bunch of others do as well – here’s just one example:

Once upon a time, a thing happened.A giant beanstalk grows in Jack’s back yard.

As a result, three things happened, one after the other.Jack climbs/descends the beanstalk three times.

The first thing was a thing.Jack steals a bag of gold, “Fee-fi-fo-fum” etc.

The second thing was different but not really.Jack steals the golden goose, “Fee-fi-fo-fum” etc.

But the third thing went BOOM / WHOOSH / THUD.Jack steals the magic harp, which cries out (BOOM), the giant chases Jack (WHOOSH), who chops down beanstalk (THUD).

And now it’s a new thing.Jack and his mother are rich and never have to work again.

Sometimes called the Rule of Three, this storytelling trope is pretty much the oldest one in the book, and it’s used and re-used by writers to this very day. It arguably plays roles in Freytag’s pyramid, Campbell’s hero-journey, and perhaps even Aristotle’s formula for successful drama, vide his great exemplar, Sophoceles’ Oedipus Rex:

Once upon a time, a thing happenedOedipus vows to find Laius’ killer.

As a result, three things happened, one after the otherThree old men are summoned to testify.

The first thing went POWThe first old man (Tiresias) implicates Oedipus as the killer. Oedipus responds with threats.

The second thing also went POWThe second old man (first shepherd) gives evidence further implicating Oedipus, who responds with more threats.

But the third thing went BOOMThe third old man (second shepherd) confirms the guilt of Oedipus, who responds by blinding himself.

And we all learned a new thingDestiny is a bitch.

(MacBeth comes to mind here as well, with the three witches and their whole Glamis/Cawdor/King business.)

So with such literary heavies as Sophocles and Shakespeare (as well as Dante, come to think of it) weighing in, James Joyce certainly wouldn’t allow himself to be left out. He enters into this fray with an eye to creating a very specific effect, however, and so adds his own set of rules to the trope’s makeup. I call it the “Prankquean Matrix” to distinguish it from the general “rule of three”, and I take my moniker from one of the more celebrated passages in Finnegans Wake…

…and it goes a little like this:

JoyceGeek Presents: The Prankquean Video

Sure, the language here is difficult – it’s Finnegans Wake after all. But knowledge of the source material Joyce used for this passage (Grace O’Malley & the Earl of Howth, St. Patrick & the druid, Grania & Dermot, etc.) is hardly a prerequisite for understanding pp. 21-23 (though it’s certainly always a good thing to have). Every bit as simple as ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’, the story’s structural breakdown is almost sophomoric:

Once upon a time, a thing happenedJarl von Hoother is holed up with his three charges: the jiminy Tristopher, the jiminy Hilary, and the dummy.

As a result, three things happened, one after the otherThe Prankquean riddles Jarl and kidnaps his charges.

The first thing went POW“Mark the wans” etc. Jarl shuts the gates, the prankquean nabs jiminy Tristopher.

The second thing also went POW“Mark the twy” etc. Jarl shuts the gates again, the prankquean nabs jiminy Hilary.

But the third thing went BOOM/WHOOSH/THUD“Mark the tris”etc. (the prankquean is presumably about to nab the dummy), Jarl is provoked / Thunder.

And we all learned a new thingThe fable concludes with a number of “morals”.

So leaving aside the typically impenetrable linguistic details, what we have here is almost pure archetype, and if we want to suggest an avatar for the trope as Joyce used it, the distorted language actually serves to create some critically helpful ambiguities:

The only unambiguous issue here is gender – a female (prankquean) provokes a male (Hoother) three times etc – and with one single exception (that I could find), Joyce assigned these specific gender roles each and every time he incorporated the ‘rule of three’ into his writing. The exception can be found in the following extremely subtle example which, as always, Joyce created to a purpose:

from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

(The prankquean matrix pattern will become much more blatant as we progress through more examples, but uncovering its subtle occurrences in Joyce can be as fun a parlor-game as finding the H.C.E. acrostic in Finnegans Wake.)

Immediately before Stephen Dedalus vomits “profusely in agony” in chapter three, he imagines the demons of his Roman Catholic Guilt following a “hither and thither” pattern. This phrase: “hither and thither” – which I’ve highlighted in red below – is repeated exactly three times, and will be later developed into something of a leitmotif in Joyce’s other works:

—Creatures were in the field: one, three, six: creatures were moving in the field, hither and thither. Goatish creatures with human faces, horny­browed, lightly bearded and grey as india-rubber. The malice of evil glittered in their hard eyes, as they moved hither and thither, trailing their long tails behind them. A rictus of cruel malignity lit up greyly their old bony faces. One was clasping about his ribs a torn flannel waistcoat, another complained monotonously as his beard stuck in the tufted weeds. Soft language issued from their spittleless lips as they swished in slow circles round and round the field, winding hither and thither through the weeds, dragging their long tails amid the rattling canisters. They moved in slow circles, circling closer and closer to enclose, to enclose, soft language issuing from their lips, their long swishing tails besmeared with stale shite, thrusting upwards their terrific faces . . .—Help!

This rather ‘goth’ passage takes place near the novel’s center, at a point where Stephen’s aesthetic is still very much in incubation. As Stephen matures, the narrative associations in the novel mature as well, so that by the end of the fourth chapter, we have a near perfect inversion of the above passage, again with a threefold repetition of “hither and thither”, and again followed immediately by a foundation-shaking catharsis:

—She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither. The first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as the bells of sleep; hither and thither, hither and thither; and a faint flame trembled on her cheek.
—Heavenly God! cried Stephen’s soul, in an outburst of profane joy.

The larger sections of which these two passages are a part also invite careful cross-comparison. Both are stunning outpourings of lyrical prose with near identical syntax and rhythm, and as the above examples demonstrate, the vocabulary even matches from time to time. One could argue that the second passage simply sublimates the first.

But this is more than mere sublimation. The girl in the stream – much like Dante’s Beatrice – is a kind of herald, trumpeting a permanent associative shift in Joyce’s prose. From this point on, Stephen (and Joyce by proxy, of course) will hold fast to two basic associations:

The phrase “hither and thither” will be used exclusively to invoke the feminine and/or water.

The ‘rule of three’ trope will be used exclusively to describe a female-to-male interaction as defined by the Prankquean Matrix.

(This blogpost is all about association #2, of course, but very quickly: the “hither and thither” examples to which I refer are mostly from Finnegans Wake: p. 158 lines 25 & 32, p. 216 line 4, p. 452, lines 27-28, etc. There is at least one from Ulysses as well, though: Gabler ed. p. 288, line 626.)

So turning to Dubliners…

(… and yes, I know, Dubliners is an earlier work than Portrait. I place it later in my mind because I assume it to have been composed by a post-Portrait Stephen Dedalus, i.e. a matured Joyce who has already worked out his aesthetic guidelines.)

Three-fold female-to-male interactions are everywhere in Dubliners, and often constitute the structure of entire stories. Here are just a few examples:

Counterparts

Three things happen, one after the other:Farrington (male) is denied access to three females: Miss Delacour, the nameless London woman, and Mrs Farrington

The first thing went POW:Miss Delacour smiles broadly / Farrington is emboldened.

The second thing went KA-POW:London woman brushes past Farrington / Farrington is aroused.

But the third thing went BOOM:Mrs Farrington goes to the chapel instead of cooking dinner / Farrington is enraged.

And now it’s a new thing:Farrington beats his son.

Clay

Once upon a time, a thing happened:The Donnellys throw a Hallow’s Eve party..

As a result, three things happened, one after the other:Maria (female) embarrasses herself three times in front of Joe Donnelly (male).

The first thing went POW:Maria loses the plumcake and nearly cries outright / Joe comforts her.

The second thing went KA-POW:Maria suggests a reconciliation with Alphy / Joe rebuffs her.

But the third thing went THUD:Maria sings poorly / Joe is moved, becomes maudlin, weeps.

And now it’s a new thing:Joe’s corkscrew is missing.

The Dead

Once upon a time, a thing happened:The Misses Morkan host their annual dinner.

As a result, three things happened, one after the other:Three females (Lily, Miss Ivors, Gretta) provoke Gabriel Conroy.

The first thing went POW:Lily: “The men that is now is only all palaver” etc. / Gabriel is irritated.

The second thing went KA-POW:Miss Ivors: “West Briton!” / Gabriel is aggravated.

But the third thing went BOOM:Gretta:“I think he died for me.” / Gabriel is devastated.

And now it’s a new thing:Generous tears, etc.

All of these stories adhere to Joyce’s prankqueanish gender assignments – females provoking males. They are all neatly divided into three sections: ‘Counterparts’: work / pub crawl / home, ‘Clay’: work / shopping-spree / party, ‘The Dead’: before / during / after dinner. And seemingly random references to the number three are almost comically ubiquitous throughout all of these stories: Farrington’s son offers to “say a Hail Mary” exactly three times, during the course of ‘Clay’ exactly three items are lost and Maria’s nose is described as nearly touching her chin exactly three times, and Gabriel famously toasts “the Three Graces (Joyce’s capitalization) of the Dublin musical world”. These occurrences are prankquean obliques – not examples of the prankquean trope by themselves but merely signals of her matrix’s presence.

There are many more prankqueanish instances in Dubliners than just these three, but these are the most obvious, and three, after all, is the magic number here. I’ll save the other Dubliners examples for a later post.

Moving onto Ulysses…

The opening of the ‘Calypso’ chapter has a rather cute exchange:

Once upon a time, a thing happens:It’s breakfast time.

As a result, three things happen, one after the other:The cat (female) approaches Bloom (Male) “with tail on high”.

This exchange appears to be a trivialization of the pattern, but notice: the cat’s vocalizations are not mere repetition. Each one builds off of its predecessor, inserting a vocal “r” with each new utterance. Had Bloom continued to withhold milk, we can assume the fourth would be “Mrkrgrnao!” As is typical with Joyce, however, the pattern breaks after three.

It’s worth noting that the cat’s mewing sound ends each time with “nao”, a sound to be echoed later – and again thrice – by young Tommy Caffrey at the beginning of the ‘Nausicaa’ chapter:

Now this is true trivialization: no signs of change nor accrual from one instance to the next, and apart from the narrative shift to Gerty, nothing significant happens as a result, certainly not ‘BOOM’. So this doesn’t really qualify as a true prankquean exchange. Rather, this passage is another prankquean oblique – a signal to be on the lookout for the true pattern in the pages to come, and sure enough, careful scrutiny reveals the following:

Once upon a time, a thing happens:Gerty (female) and Bloom (male) are on the beach in Sandymount.

As a result, three things happen, one after the other:Gerty reveals herself to Bloom in three different ways.

The first thing goes POW:She kicks the ball and makes eye contact with Bloom.

The second thing goes KA-POW:She removes her hat and reveals her hair, “raising the devil” in Bloom.

But the third thing goes BOOM/WHOOSH/THUD:She arches back to reveal her knickers. Bloom bastes his loins.

And now it’s a new thing:“Cuckoo Cuckoo Cuckoo” (3x)

All of this is of course merely prep-work for the ‘Circe’ chapter, which works countless prankqueanish echoes and variants into its narrative, from the three wealthy socialites of Bloom’s hallucination (Mrs Bellingham, Mrs Yelverton Barry and the Honourable Mrs Mervyn Talboys) to the three whores whom he and Stephen encounter in the flesh (Zoe, Kitty and Florry). Nothing in ‘Circe’ is clean, however, so the pattern doesn’t seem to take a solid hold here as it does elsewhere, although certainly the apparition of Stephen’s mother feels very much like ‘the third thing that goes BOOM’. Plus, it can hardly be mere coincidence that the mother’s appearance comes as a near-direct consequence of the pianola’s playing “My Girl’s A Yorkshire Girl“, a song in three-quarter time with three verses about three men who share a single woman. If this isn’t enough to establish Joyce’s commitment to the pattern, nothing is.

So then, back to the Wake.

A major problem arises with what properly should be the Pankquean Matrix’s ultimate expression: Finnegans Wake pp. 219-259, “The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies” (Joyce’s own title). It’s a chapter rife with Prankquean signposts: It culminates with a thunderword (#7) and concludes with overtones of a “moral” – the final sentence of the chapter being one of the most lauded in the entire book. And it contains numerous threefold interactions between male and female, most notably on page 225:

This last interaction is of course famously evocative of tearful Tommy Caffrey’s exclamations in ‘Nausicaa’, and much like Bloom’s cat, develops a phonetic accrual from one utterance to the next.

So you may be well asking the same question Wake scholars have been asking for three-quarters of a century now: With the first exchange from p. 225 looking an awful lot like the thing that goes POW, especially when paired with the KA-POWish one on p. 233, where’s the third exchange preceding the BOOM on p. 257?

Answer: there is none.

…at least none that the scholars can agree on. One of my favorite Wake scholars, John Gordon, sees it happening on p. 247:

—I rose up one maypole morning and saw in my glass how nobody loves me but you. Ugh. Ugh.—All point in the shem direction as if to shun.
—My name is Misha Misha but call me Toffey Tough. I mean Mettenchough. It was her, boy the boy that was loft in the larch. Ogh! Ogh!

—Willest thou rossy banders havind?—He simules to be tight in ribbings round his rumpffkorpff.
—Are you Swarthants that’s hit on a shorn stile?—He makes semblant to be swiping their chimbleys.
—Can you ajew ajew fro’ Sheidam?—He finges to be cutting up with a pair of sissers and to be buy­tings of their maidens and spitting their heads into their facepails.

Still others place it on p. 252:

—Now may Saint Mowy of the Pleasant Grin be your ever­glass and even prospect!
—Feeling dank.—Exchange, reverse.
—And may Saint Jerome of the Harlots’ Curse make family three of you which is much abedder!
—Grassy ass ago.

And Roland MacHugh, perhaps more persuasively than anyone else, claims in his Annotations (with Slepon chiming in as well) that the final exchange is on p.253:

But Noodynaady’s actual ingrate tootle is of come into the garner mauve and thy nice are stores of morning and buy me a bunch of iodines.—Evidentament he has failed as tiercely as the deuce before for she is wearing none of the three.

While there are good arguments for all of these speculations (and probably more), I think they’re all likely fueled by little more than a desire for the pattern to be completed. Joyce has, of course, quite deliberately built up these expectations over the course of four novels, but his writing really only ever consistently follows one rule, and here it is:

Rules are for breaking.

The ‘Mime’ chapter is, after all, a study of childhood, and children never respond to rules very well.

This, in my view, is the ultimate function of the Prankquean Matrix. The vast majority of examples from Joyce’s works I’ve cited here involve the male figure experiencing a disruption of one kind or another – of routine, of agenda, of rigid thought-pattern. In this sense, the Prankquean Matrix actually functions as more of a formula for change than it does a trope for storytellers, and this is the reason I believe Joyce so consistently assigned a feminine/puerile value to the disruption. Women and children may be first onto the lifeboats, but in a world ruled by men, they are the marginalized, inconvenient voice of the other that need only be pushed aside in order to go boom.

Walking tours of Dublin are an absolute treat – some argue necessity – for the curious Joyce reader. You can do it either through the Joyce Centre on Great George’s Street, the James Joyce Summer School, or simply using xerox photocopies of the numerous maps from Don Gifford’s annotation books. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners, and especially Ulysses will come to light in many wonderful and surprising ways, and the city of Dublin is very much ready to accommodate you if you’re seeking to visualize the experience contained in these three books.

Finnegans Wake is a different matter, though, and not just because its prose is difficult. For one thing, most of the Wake‘s Dublin references are to Phoenix park, and the Dublin tourism industry doesn’t seem to have any interest in providing Phoenix park/Chapelizod tour buses for Wake enthusiasts. We’re pretty much on our own, I’m afraid, and it’s not easy. The Phoenix park is Eurasia’s seventh largest municipal park, meaning a whole lot of legwork. It’s worth it, though, and not just for Wake readers. Surprisingly, the Wakean tour of Phoenix Park provides crucial insight into the other books – especially Ulysses. It is a little tricky, though. So where better to start than…

The Famous Quotation

The following is a famous quotation. No, I mean it – it’s really famous. I’ve heard it read out loud at Joyce conference panels so many times that as soon as I hear the words “Joyce once told Frank Budgen…” I already know what’s coming, and I have to actively prevent my eyes from rolling. For Joyceans, it’s basically the equivalent of “Four-score and seven years ago”, and it’s emblazoned on virtually every single Joyce guidebook and map the Dublin Tourism Center on Suffolk Street can shove into your hands:

“I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day sud­denly dis­appeared from the earth it could be recon­structed out of my book.”

-from Budgen’s James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses

Grandiose and provocative though this second-hand quote may be, it’s also hackneyed, simplistic, and hardly ever scrutinized. If we are to assume – as Budgen clearly intends us to – that Joyce meant Ulysses when he said “my book”, the Dublin we’d be reconstructing from its pages wouldn’t have a Wellington Monument…

Perhaps Budgen mis-heard his friend saying “my books” – plural, for just about everything in the the above map is referenced in Finnegans Wake – in most cases repeatedly, and some ubiquitously. According to Louis Mink, over 300 direct references to and meditations on the Phoenix park and its features are distributed more or less evenly throughout the book, with that number essentially doubling if you include Chapelizod, the small strip of high-end suburbia that hugs the park’s southern border along the Liffey.

Ulysses is another matter entirely.

I encourage anyone interested to word-search the above place-names in a Ulysses etext – some of them are there, but without exception their references are marginal and unenlightening. Bloom recalls a water well near the “Hole in the Wall” (U5.296-7, 17.210), Molly imagines a trip “to the furry glen or the strawberry beds” (U18.948), and Stephen… …umm, okay Stephen doesn’t think about the park … or anything in it … or around it … at all. Add Bloom’s occasional and extremely vague, misinformed references to the “Phoenix Park Murders” of 1882 (more than twenty years previous), and there’s your complete list of meditations on Phoenix Park by the three main protagonists of Ulysses. There are a few other exceptions, and other characters give the park occasional mention, but that’s pretty much it. (Chapelizod also receives virtually zero mention in Ulysses. For the record, here’s the one exception from the ‘Aeolus’ chapter [U7.732]: “Ignatius Gallaher we all know and his Chapelizod boss, Harmsworth of the farthing press…”)

More to the point – and this is the big shocker – the only event in the whole of Ulysses to actually happen within the park’s boundaries is the following sentence:

William Humble, earl of Dudley, and lady Dudley, accompanied by lieutenant­colonel Heseltine, drove out after luncheon from the vice­regal lodge. (U10.1176)

…and that’s it – period. In sum, there is no Phoenix Park to “reconstruct” from the pages of Ulysses in terms of description. This is kind of astonishing considering the amount of sheer acreage the park constitutes: Most Joyce-readers are aware of the fact that Phoenix Park is big, but it’s still shocking to see just how enormous it is when you compare it to Dublin City as defined by its canals:Even if you argue that Phoenix Park isn’t really part of Dublin City “proper”, you still have to explain why the novel would come so close to completely ignoring it, especially since four of its chapters take place much further away from city-centre than the park:Plus, while no actual Bloomsday event takes place in Howth, Howth would certainly be easier to reconstruct from Ulysses than Phoenix Park, as would Gibraltar, for that matter.

So I’m going to do something that should make the Freudians out there smile (and everyone else grimace, consequently) and argue that James Joyce makes the Pheonix park as conspicuous by its absence in Ulysses as its presence is in Finnegans Wake. By way of example: three of Phoenix Park’s most noticeable features – all within Dublin’s city limits and all major locales in Finnegans Wake – are given no mention whatsoever in Ulysses, and careful comparison reveals an interesting pattern. We’ll start with the “biggie”:

The Wellington Testimonial

The Wellington Monument (officially “Testimonial”) is famously “toured” in the early pages of Finnegans Wake (the “Museyroom” passage, pp. 8-10) and from there, references to either Wellington, his memorial, or the Museyroom run all the way through the book.

Its COMPLETE absence in Ulysses could only be deliberate. The W.M. was by far the tallest structure in 1904 Dublin, over half-again as high as Nelson’s Pillar (the second tallest), and not to be outreached until 2003 by ‘the spire’. It would have been visible from any Dublin rooftop or southern quay on the west side of town. Joyce could easily have had Bloom take note of it any one of the numerous times he crosses a bridge over the Liffey, not to mention when he’s buying Sweets of Sin at the bookstall on Wellington(!) Quay – that would have been the perfect place to make mention of the monument, both thematically and practically:

But no – neither he nor anyone else in the novel ever take time to notice or even think about the single largest landmark within Dublin city limits.

So what gives? Joyce didn’t have any kind of “author’s allergy” to it, witness Dubliners:

“Gabriel’s warm, trembling fingers tapped the cold pane of the window. How cool it must be outside! How pleasant it would be to walk out alone, first along by the river and then through the park! The snow would be lying on the branches of the trees and forming a bright cap on the top of the Wellington Monument. How much more pleasant it would be there than at the supper-table!” (‘The Dead’)

Here’s where visiting the Phoenix park itself really starts to pay off. Gabriel Conroy’s idealized and overly-sentimental attitude would be immediately quashed if he actually did what he contemplates here. The Wellington Testimonial sits in the middle of a tree-less, shelter-less field and once you’re there, the obelisk is utterly impossible to take in – it’s just too big. Even with a foot of snow on it, Gabriel still wouldn’t have been able to see a “bright cap” at the top, and what he could see would have been even more vandalized than what I photographed in 2002:Because of the design of the monument itself, I had to hold my camera way above my head in order to get these shots – getting them head-on would have required a telescopic lens. And note: the Irish are very careful not to vandalize memorials to people they like – O’Connell, Parnell, Larkin, etc., and climbing high enough to put the paint(?) on these inset plaques would have taken a lot of determined effort. This is the kind of stuff they were doing to King Billy’s statue, General Gough’s statue and Nelson’s Pillar before eventually blowing them up. Ask a native Dubliner why they didn’t do the same with Wellington, they’re likely to tell you that the Archduke was born in Ireland, and so gets a pass. I’m personally skeptical of this response: Wellington himself denounced his Irish lineage by quipping that a man born in a stable was not a horse – a deliberate insult if you ask me. I think a much more likely explanation as to why the W.M. wasn’t destroyed during the Troubles is because it’s made of solid stone and would basically require an ICBM to level; getting rid of the pillar was hard enough. The point is Wellington’s monuments and statues are loathed and vandalized all over the current and former British Empire, from Ireland to India. Of course they’re also celebrated; Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington is nearly as much a synecdoche for British imperial power as the royals or the Union Jack. The inscription on the right-hand side in the above photos reads:

Asia and Europe, saved by thee, proclaim
Invincible in war thy deathless name,
Now round thy brow the civic oak we twine
That every earthly glory may be thine.

This borders on straight-up supplication – the only thing missing is the “amen” at the end. No: Gabriel Conroy was wrong. No self-respecting Irishman claiming Nationalist sympathies would find the Wellington Monument during a nighttime January snowstorm even remotely pleasant.

Even in broad daylight the place is creepy.

The Magazine Wall/Starfort*

*Louis Mink makes a dis­tinc­tion bet­ween the Ma­ga­zine Wall – just south of the park, and the Magazine Star­fort – within the park. Joyce him­self doesn’t bother making this dis­tinc­tion, however, so neither will I.

Built in 1734 by the occupying British army in case of revolt by the natives, the Magazine Wall/Starfort – is about a half-mile west of the Wellington Monument. Here’s the GoogleMap aerial view:Another locale that receives ubiquitous mention in FinnegansWake (p. 44-47 et al), the Magazine Fort sits atop a hill (also mentioned frequently in the Wake – vide FW7.31-32 et al) where you can get a fairly decent view of the surrounding area. But the fort itself is essentially impossible to take in by the naive Joycean tourist. An enormous trench and thick overgrowth surround the entire structure, which is itself closed to the general public due to its current state of disrepair.Attempts have been made to turn the fort into a museum, but what kind of traffic would this blatant reminder of Ireland’s Troubles receive? Were it not so sturdily constructed, my guess is that it would have been demolished long ago.

Creepy creepy. Unpleasant to visit, unpleasant to think about, the Magazine’s excision from the minds and memories of the denizens of Ulysses is somewhat understandable, and if you pair it with the neighboring Wellington Monument, you start to see a pattern of sorts – at least I do.

The Dublin Zoological Gardens

Like the Wellingtom Monument and Magazine Wall, the Dublin Zoo receives detailed and lyrical treatment in Finnegans Wake (pp. 244-246), and again, no mention in Ulysses whatsoever.

But wait a minute – zoos are much more pleasant to visit. Witness these stills from the Dublin Zoo website:…very pleasant indeed. I’ve been to the Dublin Zoo myself, and the habitats were quite nice – even if the animals within them didn’t seem particularly thrilled to be there.

Of course, one should bear in mind that zoos back at the turn of the century were a little different:This sketch was taken at the Jardin de Plantes, Paris, in 1902. I couldn’t find any comparable Dublin Zoo photos, but we can assume conditions in Dublin were just as bad if not worse. Joyce wouldn’t have gone anywhere near such a place, and not just because of the sickening prison-like atmosphere, or that the idiot dangling the doggie-bag half-a-meter from the tiger or the moron who laid his sketchbook inches away from the male lion’s grasp were likely to lose an arm. Admission in 1904 was prohibitively expensive for most Dubliners; only the posh, mostly pro-British class had any real access to it, and judging from the above photo, their behavior inside would have been further testimony to the Brits’ general attitude of imperial entitlement.

Creepy creepy creepy.

Nightmare Fuel

The hard fact is that unless you were a polo-player, Phoenix Park would have been a miserable place to go on a Thursday in June 1904, even imaginatively. Any mention of Phoenix Park in Ulysses is likely to have the word “murder” nearby, and when you look closely at the final passage in ‘Wandering Rocks’, the Viceregal Cavalcade (avatar of imperial subjugation and the park’s single issue) is spit out of the Park’s mouth like a trail of venom and stops the entire city dead in its tracks as it makes its way to the Mirus Bazaar on the other side of town, nearly trampling Denis Breen, Dilly Dedalus and others in its violent wake.

So while Finnegans Wake is all that Joseph Campbell, Michael Begnal and others say it is – with its mono-mythologies blending the phoenix with Christ with the Buddha etc. all into a glorious dreamscheme of pluralistic humanity, it’s also the very unpleasant thing that Edmund Wilson, Kimberly Devlin and others say it is – the unreadable, the unthinkable, the impenetrable, the nightmarish. The museyroom passage tickles us with “tip” and its goofy cadences, but it also recounts some of humankind’s bloodiest pre-20th century battles. The “Magazine Wall” may very well be where Earwicker gratifies his desires, but it’s also where he is caught, mugged and humiliated. And while the cries of the zoo animals recounted in the Mime chapter may be stunningly lyrical (some argue it to be the most beautiful passage in the book), they’re also the cries of the caged, the oppressed, the conquered.

Chances are that this is the real reason why the Dublin Tourism Office doesn’t have much to offer Wake readers. Finnegans Wake has lots of lightness and comedy in it, but it is in its essence a study of the shadow-self, that part of us we prefer not to look at. Perhaps obfuscating the language is Joyce’s way of enticing us to look anyway.